K12 Education Technology Discussion with Jim Heynderickx

We’re looking at new VOIP phone systems, and we’ve had presentations and quotes for Cisco, Mitel, Shoretel and Digium Switchvox so far. We need a system with around 215 handsets and 350 extensions, and our configuration needs are very simple.

The last time I bought a PBX, it took a solid week of computer-aided instruction in a corporate phone center to be trained how to add an extension, create a menu tree, and understand the 8 foot wide stack of documentation. Everything was done via the command line in the PBX’s proprietary operating system. It was very much a black box system.

This time around, it appears that most systems have evolved to have easy (or easier) to use web interfaces and less complicated setups. The system we’re looking most closely at is the Digium Switchvox system: http://www1.digium.com/

We’re interested because of its simplicity, redundancy, lower cost of ownership in terms of licenses (since it is based on the Asterisk open source phone platform), direct voicemail to email, support of soft phones like Bria (http://www.counterpath.com/bria-iphone-edition.html), and SIP trunk compatibility.

Digium is now offering handsets that were built to work with the system, and we’re seeing these for the first today. We also have the opportunity to talk with the founder of company today at a trade show this afternoon.

So, has anyone deployed one of these systems lately? Feedback? Success or regrets?

Yes, we have this system which Foehn supplied, installed and manage.
It was relatively painless and works very well indeed – this is the first time we have installed a VOIP system and it proved alot less complicated than we had expected, easy to manage and Foehn are a well-run outfit.

Crunch.co.uk is growing fast and we needed the very latest phone technology, without the sheer expense of normal phone systems.

Foehn did a great job and their Technical Director James Passingham has been superb at helping us to add every possible business continuity measure, critical to delivering our full accounting service here.

We did suffer a power supply issue in one switchvox however foehn installed a hot standby and trained us on backups, which our system administrator does weekly. We can swop in 1/2hr and handle calls with our backup centre in the meantime.

All in all thoroughly impressed and have recommended them to many of my peers in the dot com world and further.

The trend to VOIP telephones is hitting the industrial marketplace as well. Plants are looking at installing VOIP phones to increase plant safety and productivity. Plus, cost of installation is low. We have received inquiries from the educaton sector as well from vocational schools who want to install ruggedized VOIP phones – do you see this as a larger trend?

Thanks to everyone for the helpful comments. We’re continuing our review process, and I’ll report back later on.

As for ruggedized VOIP phones, a vocational school might be a good fit. We’ve also considered wireless VOIP phones as a replacement for our hand-held radios, but I’m not certain if there is push-to-talk functionality available.